The Final Disposition of the '57 Chevy Sedan Delivery

 In another post (the one right below this one) I talked about once owning a 1957 Chevrolet Sedan Delivery. It was a rare model, as I said, and as far as I know, mine was one of only two in the entire Kansas City area. Granted, that's not a huge area, but whatever. That's rare. 

I drove it around Independence, where I lived, for several months after I first arrived from the SF Bay Area, and it served me well. Then one day I was driving along a four-lane road and crossed a bridge that was short and quite high--I mean there was little visibility--and ran into another car that was proceeding from left to right from a parking lot on the north side of the street to another parking lot (a Hudson gas station, actually) on the south side. There was no warning and I'm not sure what that guy thought he was doing. My car pretty much crumpled from the front doors forward, ruined the grill, the hood, the radiator, and damaged the water pump, and bent the frame also, as it turned out. 

I was thrown forward (no seat belts) and my right hand slid into the glove box, which had popped open, and I cut my hand on the locking mechanism of the glove box door. No, none of this stuff was made of plastic. 

The police came and the other guy was issued a ticket. I was sitting in the back seat of the police car, having been invited to do so--I was not in trouble, as remarkable as that may sound--and the other guy's parents arrived. The other guy, I note, was probably in his thirties. The mother talked briefly to the officer in the front of the car I was sitting in, and was crying. When she moved away, the cop turned in his seat and said to me, "She'll cry when she sees this ticket I'm giving her son."  I felt pretty vindicated, or at least "in-the-right." I was in an accident and it was clearly established that it was NOT MY FAULT. You remember stuff like that. 

The father came up and said something to the cop, then asked me if I had insurance. (I learned later he was a lawyer.) I did not. He said, "Yeah, that's tough when NO ONE has insurance." (Emphasis mine.) Anyway, I was eighteen and I had no idea how this stuff works. All I knew was that my car was totaled. 

By the way, at that time, which was the late Sixties, I'm pretty sure all I would have gotten for my car would be the Blue Book value, which was probably a couple hundred bucks. The rarity of that model would not have entered into the calculation. I was just out of luck, and on foot. 

The story doesn't deserve too much real estate here. Eventually I sold the car to someone who apparently had access to a frame straightening shop or something. It was winter, and I had parked the car beside a gas station I worked at. The buyer asked if I could deliver the car to his house. I figured I could--since it was winter--if I disconnected all the broken stuff from the engine, which was the generator and the water pump and drove it the two or three miles. I charged up the battery so all I needed to do was make sure the engine didn't get too hot in the short drive. It was about 25 degrees out that day, so that was actually no problem. 

The big surprise was just how damn good that engine ran without the water pump and generator hooked up to it. I had no idea that those two accessories "robbed" so much horsepower. So it was kind of fun ferrying the car across town, but it made me wish real hard that I could figure out a way to keep it and resurrect it somehow. Oh well, as they say. 

That's almost the end of that story. I was always kind of peeved that I lost a car, got no recompense, and the guy that caused the wreck maybe got a ticket. If I had insurance, it would have been a little different, but not by much, as I said. The real end of the story was when I visited the house of a new girlfriend. I was sitting on the living room couch waiting to take Ellen out when one of her uncles came by for something. I was introduced and he kept saying my last name over and over again, as if trying to jog his memory. "Do I know you?" he asked. 

I shook my head, but he was the father of the guy who drove his car in front of me that fateful day and claimed he had no insurance. But I really didn't care, by that time.